Fall of the Year
by Study in Silence
Summary: Gibbs is killed when he is attacked by a suspect… sort of. When he wakes up in a drawer in the NCIS morgue he finds that some things about himself have changed. GibbsZiva, mid Season Six.


Fall of the Year

_I know there's more than one of these out there, but I've been planning this for months now. Despite any and all appearances, this is not a death-fic. _

_&_

The routine is familiar. I hang my hat and overcoat on the coat hanger, replace my clean, unspoiled day clothes with blue surgical scrubs. I trade my loafers for a pair of worn white sneakers that saw the world of the living for the last time a great while ago. The objective today, though, is in no way routine. The morgue is silent when I walk in; silent but not empty. Mr. Palmer is sitting in front of the microscope and I know he is trying not to look at the other two occupants of my autopsy room.

As for me, well, I find I cannot look away.

His features are pale in repose, lips blue around the edges, with a look of age about his face that had never crept up on him fully while he lived. He was an enigmatic man in life. Introverted and gruff, caught up in the past and so often full of sadness. At times arrogant and insensitive, yet with the capacity for great care and loyalty. Oh Jethro, I do not think you know how much we will all miss you. Then again… perhaps you did know how much of a hole you would leave.

I feel guilty over the budding anger directed towards him. For what? For dying and leaving me to do the autopsy? He didn't choose to die, but I can't help it.

"Good morning, Doctor Mallard." Jimmy's voice is subdued.

I can't bring myself to tear my eyes away from the bodies of my old friend and his attacker. Despite that it hurts me physically to look at them. "Hello Mr. Palmer. Although, I cannot say that this morning is a good one."

The blood had been cleaned away from their wounds; their clothes stripped away, evidence collected. Courtesy of Mr. Palmer. It is selfish, but that is one thing I am very glad I don't have to deal with. I already know that these autopsies will be incredibly difficult.

Killer and victim, laid out side by side in death. It is hard to think of Gibbs as anyone's victim. Perhaps I should say they killed each other. It was that dark-haired young man who was dead first, after all. Jethro, only God knows how, managed to hold on long enough for the ambulance to arrive. They—I mean Ziva, said that he died on the way to the hospital. Since she rode with him, she would know.

For so many years it seemed like he was invincible. It was an irrational belief, one might say, and yet he came out of every scrape, disaster and near cataclysm alive and somewhat unscathed. Maybe… maybe it had to have happened eventually.

Ziva was cold and detached when I saw her today, much in the same way she was during his coma three years ago. At that time I feared that she might not care enough to have a reaction; I now know that to be a coping mechanism. The two of them shared something very strong. Some sort of bond.

She is very quiet. Anthony even more so.

The four of them—Gibbs, Ziva, Anthony and McGee arrested a Chief Petty Officer for dealing drugs to his command. McGee had stayed behind with the handcuffed Chief Petty Officer while the other three cleared the rest of his house. Something happened. Another person jumped on top of Gibbs when he opened a door. Gibbs' gun was knocked away and they obviously had struggled.

Tony and Ziva heard the struggle and came running. By the time they got there, both were lying on the ground, on top of one another. They tried to pull the John Doe off of Gibbs, and….

I can see the damage from where I stand.

I walk over to the autopsy tables, my steps halting. I feel so old, so much frailer then I did before I was given this news. I suppose I expected him, nearly twenty years younger then I am, to outlive me. There is a red slit about an inch long in the center of the John Doe's back, just to the left of the spine. The murder weapon is no mystery—the ka-bar fighting knife that usually took up residence in Gibbs' sock.

Rule Number Nine: Never go anywhere without a knife. I chuckle sadly.

Jethro himself has finger marks on his shoulders where his attacker gripped him. And… I try to fight down the revulsion that fills me at the sight of the great, gaping wound in his throat, like a great, yawning, violently crimson chasm breaking the smooth constancy of death-whitened skin. The corresponding chunk of flesh and skin is caught between the John Doe's sharp white teeth.

It is easy enough to remain unaffected by the gory nature of wounds while looking at a stranger.

Though the younger man was already dead, Gibbs was still alive when they pulled away the clinging corpse, in doing so causing all that flesh to be ripped out. An ambulance was called. By the blood on her clothing last night, I know it was Ziva who had tried, to no avail, to keep the blood from flooding out of his severed carotid artery.

"Doctor," Jimmy said hesitantly. "Should we prep for autopsy?"

My eyes begin to tear. I shudder away the images and steel myself for what I must do. "Yes. Let's get this over with."

_&_

It is Jethro I autopsy first. The PERK, the external exam, felt like an invasion of his privacy more then it ever had before, though I did not find anything unexpected.

The shapes and locations of wounds are marked on the paper diagram with a black magic marker. My hand feels almost too heavy to lift off the clipboard.

The scalpel slides through scarred skin and lean muscle as I make the Y incision and I can't help but imagine it cutting into my own body. I almost look to see if he is watching me. Vance did me the courtesy of asking if I would rather he bring in another ME to dissect my best friend; when I cut his ribs with a series of fibrous-sounding snaps I almost wish that I hadn't declined. The Director's acceptance of my refusal at the time had been suspicious and I know he was thinking that I would have a hard time being objective. I fear he was correct. Yet I did the autopsies on Jennifer and dear Caitlin, and painful though they were, I managed to get through them.

Despite Palmer's definite abilities, I do not allow him to assist—I don't think that Jethro would have liked him poking around his body. Rather, I have him start upon the John Doe.

By the time I start removing glossy red organs I have slipped into auto pilot. My usual monologue is difficult to keep up as my mind keeps losing track of the storyline. I am no longer paying much attention to what I am saying.

The systems of the deceased always reflect their lifestyles and Jethro is no exception. I find his heart in slightly better condition then I would have expected given his vast consumption of coffee and takeout food. No surprises in his liver, though what damage there was wouldn't have killed him any time soon.

There is no dispute and no confusion over what caused his death—he bled out, just as it first appeared.

I am setting aside the Stryker saw when Palmer calls me tentatively; "Doctor?"

"Yes, Jimmy?" I ask wearily and glance over at him.

A slight look of pride flashes over his face at the sound of his first name, than he turns serious. "Is this… normal, Doctor Mallard? It doesn't look like anything, well, like I've ever seen before, but you might have seen this before…"

I strip off gloves coated with Jethro's blood as I step across to the other table and peer into the flayed-open chest cavity. The sight therein raises my eyebrows. The walls of the cavity are etched with fine, wavy, crossing lines just a shade darker then the surrounding flesh, almost a crosshatched pattern. I've never seen anything quite like it. I put on a fresh pair of gloves and run a finger across it. It felt smooth, but as I prodded it lightly, it didn't give in quite the same way as these tissues usually did. "No, that is not normal…. Photograph it and take a sample for Abby, would you?"

I turned back to Gibbs with a heavy heart. The camera flashed a few times behind me, and I picked up a knife. The brain rather resembles an oversized, rumpled mushroom in color, consistency and overall appearance. I try to avoid thinking of it as his, close my eyes, and take a breath. I made a couple of slices, blood gushing over the cutting board.

I rinse the slices and examine them closely. Nothing out of the ordinary here; no red flags to be found.

Soon I am stuffing dissected organs into plastic bags and packing them back into him, reattaching the scull cap, sewing the edges of skin back together with the practiced motions of thread and a bent needle.

_Prick._

_Tug._

_Prick._

_Tug. _

_Prick._

_Tug._

_Prick._

_Tug—_

My hand stills and I look down at his throat again. Some mortuary putty should… I choke on that thought. _Why?_ Why did this have to happen? I wonder with a sudden surge of undirected anger and grief. 'This' still doesn't seem real. It never does. I know I will still expect to see him swagger into autopsy when I'm half way through an examination, expecting me to have answers.

I don't have any answers right now. Not a one.

_&_

Ducky looked up from the autopsy report when the suite's sliding glass doors _whooshed_ open. He would have thought it was Mr. Palmer returning from Abby's lab, to which he'd taken the samples they had collected, but it wasn't.

Ziva paused in the doorway, guarded dark eyes flitting from him to the still occupied autopsy table and taking in all the details in between. Her step was silent when she finally walked over the threshold, doors closing behind her.

"Hello, Ziva," Ducky greeted her, his voice propped up by false cheer. Maybe not quite _cheer,_ but at least a fairly neutral tone that didn't completely reflect what he was feeling. He furrowed his brow, watching her look at Gibbs. The stitch marks on his chest were out in the open for the world to see. The dark-colored thread was set in sharp relief against his skin, like a flock of crows flitting across a winter sky. Nothing had been done to cover his torn throat, though there was a blue sheet draped over him up to the waist—a courtesy.

Ducky had expected the entire team to avoid autopsy and the possibility of seeing their boss opened up like the plague, yet here she was. For her sake he wished she had stayed away. He really did. "Are you alright, my dear?"

Her eyes left Gibbs' body and transferred to him. They were empty, still; completely devoid of emotion. "I am fine."

He was sure that she wasn't fine. "Oh Ziva," he sighed.

"Are you finished with him?" she asked. The question was abrupt, her voice as icy as any highland winter.

Ducky nodded sadly. "Yes, the… the mortuary will pick him up tomorrow."

She nodded and glided over to the table Gibbs was laid out on; she stood staring down at him for a long minute. She raised a hand and touched his shoulder lightly, hesitantly—the same shoulder Ari had put a bullet through years ago, her thumb gliding over the scar. Her fingers trailed down the inside of his arm, tracing tendons in his wrist, before she threaded her fingers through his cold, stiff ones. It was a surprisingly tender, intimate moment. A goodbye. An action that betrayed her feelings in a way her expression refused to.

Ducky hadn't the heart to tell her she shouldn't be there. Ziva said something in Hebrew and pulled her hand out of Gibbs'. And then,

"Shalom, Jethro."

She drew back a step; she could still feel the chill and the stiffness of his hand beneath hers.

For a moment Ziva felt on the verge of breaking. Another second and she would turn away and sob. She would cry until she couldn't breathe anymore, then she would tear the remains of the one who did this to him to bloody, messy shreds because she had no one living to take revenge on. Then she reined in her unruly emotions; reined them in like one would rein in a bolting horse. She didn't want to deal with emotions; having them out in the open would be unacceptable.

She came down here because even though she had been there in the back of the ambulance when he flat lined, she wanted proof. Proof that this was real and not one of the gruesome nightmares her sleeping mind conjured up. She had barely slept last night.

Ziva had been around so much death in her life; Death hounded her like a hunter's dog, nose to the ground to catch any sign of her passing and sometimes seeming to nip at her heels. She took lives as freely as death stole people from her. It barely affected her anymore. Usually. She wasn't sure why she was so shaken up by the death of one man. Only one man.

Not her mother or her sister or her brother, not dozens of her countrymen killed in a suicide attack. A single American who she had known for a mere four years.

Maybe this was the one death she wouldn't accept. Maybe it was because she had made him out to be some sort of hero—he had certainly saved her, after all. Maybe it was because she had grown to care for him, more then she should and more then she ever thought she would or could. Whatever the reasons, she needed proof. And she needed to say goodbye.

In coming down here she walked on a razor's edge between control and oblivion, the prickle of goose bumps raised by cold spreading from the back of her neck and across her body. The sight of his body lying half naked on the table had been strange and agonizingly real. Painful like a red-hot knife plunged into her chest.

Death blew a cold breath over her spine, fingers of ice gripping her throat. Ziva shivered.

When she looked down at him she couldn't avoid having her eyes wander across the planes of his body, remembering a moment in that damn elevator when she had seen a sudden flash of pinning a living, breathing incarnation of Gibbs to the side of it. It had never escaped her attention that he was an attractive man, and she found that he had kept himself in shape. Force Reconnaissance Marines, especially snipers, were as lean and tough as anyone in Mossad and had to be for similar reasons.

That didn't make the image any less inappropriate to recall now. She didn't think about the inappropriateness.

Ziva looked at his ripped-open throat again, something about it making her skin crawl and raising the small hairs on her arms just as effectively as her hackles. These circumstances were strange, she thought as she forcefully detached herself. It was like nothing she had ever seen before. No one in their right mind killed by biting the throat. It was as impractical as it was traceable. That was easily explained as 'than the killer wasn't in his right mind', but Ziva felt something more sinister was going on here. Something else that occurred to her were Gibbs' instincts, equally as honed as her own that should have picked up on the other man's presence long before he was near enough to strike.

And he should have been able to fight him off.

Ziva vowed to herself that she would find out what that unknown factor was. She let a breath escape, turned around and left without saying anything more to Ducky.

_&_

_Severed flesh and bone weaving itself together seamlessly. Slowly swallowing up and dissolving foreign material. Larger injuries filled out and sealed over, not leaving even the faintest of scars as evidence of their existence. Systems and nerves re-wiring._

_Everything is in working order. _

_A restored heart picks up a slow beat, weak at first but growing steadier. Blood rushes through veins and out to extremities. _

_A first breath; cold air rushes into his lungs._

_&_

His eyes snapped open to take stock of his surroundings, but there was nothing to see. It was completely dark. Despite not being able to see he could tell that the space was small. _A car trunk_, was the first thought that came to mind. But his legs were stretched out instead of crammed up under his chin. The surface under his back was cold metal, and by that time his eyes had adjusted and he could see that the walls around him were the same.

It was then that he noticed his lack of clothes, which set off even more danger signals than were already ringing. The back of his skull ached from the hard surface and the slight sheen of sweat on his skin stuck to the metal. He slammed the flat of his hand against the ceiling of his prison and his head rocked to the side. A second later he dropped his hand across his bare stomach. He couldn't remember the last time he had been this exhausted. No five-days-at-the-office sleepless case or long stint of sniping in the boonies had ever left him as drained as he felt now. Just taking his next breath or forming a thought was an effort. So tired he could barely remember his own name.

Beyond that, the overreaching fact was that he was cold. Not the sort of cold for which you zipped up your coat and had a hot drink. Instead it was permeating, bone-deep, blood-freezing, hypothermic cold. His teeth clacked together; he was shivering. He felt like he had been pushed into an icy lake and then stuffed in the freezer. He very well could still be in a freezer.

But they generally didn't smell like dead bodies.

What the _hell_ was this?

His eyes drifted shut. What was the last thing he remembered? Something to do with drugs and a fight… him fighting someone. Someone jumped on him. They came off a rafter or some sort of platform. They… pinned him to the floor and bit him in the throat. His eyes snapped open again and he felt his neck. No tooth-marks. No pain. Then he must have dreamed that part. He couldn't think of a half-way acceptable reason why someone would bite him in the throat anyway.

He seemed to also remember grabbing his knife and stabbing his attacker, who had been much stronger then he was. Freakishly strong—with a hide like boiled leather and a high threshold for pain, to boot. He had done some things that should have stopped anyone, but no tactic he'd utilized up until he stabbed him had had much effect—at least not enough to stop him.

Pain and Ziva's face hovering above him with DiNozzo's form somewhere in the background, eventually the keening wails of a siren.

He swallowed. His mouth felt like it was stuffed with dry lint. What happened after that? He couldn't remember. He couldn't think. All he wanted to do was sleep.

_&_

_tbc…_

_I'm not sure when the next chapter will actually be posted, since I am working on two other projects in two other fandoms._


End file.
